We have just witnessed a peculiarly English annual ritual, as familiar as a wet bank holiday Monday. Teenagers, parents and teachers interrupt their summer holidays and congregate at schools to receive GCSE exam results. As they congratulate or commiserate each other, TV and press cameras capture the more photogenic and expressive teenagers. Mobiles ring, champagne corks pop. Anxious teachers calculate whether their pupils’ grades send their school up or down the league tables. Commentators, pundits, teachers’ unions and employers dissect the overall figures, lamenting, for example, the “national catastrophe” of a fall in entries to foreign language exams or (this year) science exams. Whether the results are up or down, someone somewhere detects falling standards.

The GCSE is what is called a high-stakes exam, a distributor of life chances for young people, a verdict on parenting skills, and a determinant of teachers’ career prospects. Very few other countries have anything like it. In many, the age of 16 is not a full stop marking the end of a whole phase of education and often entailing a move to a new school or college, but just a semi-colon in “upper-secondary education” which runs from 14 or 15 to 18 or 19. Since we are constantly told (admittedly on somewhat dubious evidence) that our schools are behind internationally, perhaps we should look at what the allegedly more successful countries do. Like, say, Finland – always near the top of the international league tables –, where young people don’t take a public, externally marked exam until 18. Or, for that matter, Scotland where a new system will delay formal exams until the end of the final, pre-university stage of schooling.

One hesitates to demand more changes to exams after the chaos and confusion caused by the meddling of successive ministers. But the abolition of GCSEs would at least be a clean break, relieving schools of a significant proportion of the exam fees which account for more than 8% of their running costs. They should be replaced, not by O-levels, Ebacs or any other idea proposed by the former education secretary Michael Gove, but by nothing at all.

Nobody should denigrate the achievements of those who received their results in the past few days. The problem lies with the exam, not them. GCSEs are obsolete and have been for several years. Exams at 16 were invented when the majority of children left full-time education at that age and moved directly into the labour market. Their function was to help employers pick the more able and diligent applicants for jobs, as well as to identify the minority considered fit to continue their education and probably go on to university and professional careers. In 2012 (the last year for which full figures are available), only 4% of 17-year-olds were in full-time employment, with another 6% in apprenticeships or “work-based learning”. Nearly three-quarters were still in conventional full-time education. So what was the point of the General Certificate of Secondary Education they took a year earlier?

GCSEs became more obsolete in 2013 when young people were for the first time required to stay in school, college or work-based learning until 17, and will be more obsolete still from next year when they will have to stay until 18.

The belief that the GCSE should be scrapped is not confined to members of what Gove fancifully called “the Blob” or “the education establishment”, allegedly comprising quasi-Marxist academics, state school teachers and union leaders who think rigorous testing damages children. The headmaster of Eton, Tony Little, has called for “Victorian-style” public exams to be delayed at least until 18. University vice-chancellors and business leaders have often taken a similar view.

Gove was right to argue that they were no longer working; he was wholly wrong to think the answer was to make them more traditional and more academically rigorous by cutting classwork assessment and devaluing or banning vocational subjects as “soft options”. Particularly egregious was the removal of “speaking and listening” from assessment in English courses, which has resulted in a sharp fall in the numbers attaining a C grade in the subject this year; as Katja Hall, deputy director general of the Confederation of British Industry, observed, these are skills nearly everybody is more likely to use at work than writing essays.

In fairness to Gove, that change was prompted by Ofqual, the exams regulator, which argued that assessing oral skills was incompatible with ensuring comparable standards across different schools and different years. But that illustrates precisely why we shouldn’t have a high-stakes, public examination at 16: it restricts education to developing the narrow range of skills that are most easily testable.

The GCSE was flawed from the start. When it was introduced in 1986 it superseded O-levels, designed originally for the top 25% of children, and CSEs, designed for the next most able 40%. (It was still thought, when those exams started, that around one-third of children were incapable of taking exams at all.) But a Tory government, while accepting the need for a single exam for 16-year-olds, insisted that the top grades of A-C must be comparable to the old O-level pass grades. The lower grades were thus devalued and pupils attaining them described as unemployable and illiterate, though most are nothing of the sort.

Over time, the top grades were also devalued, as a wider range of subjects and assessment techniques allowed more entrants to “pass”, thus creating the largely mythical belief that standards were falling. Worst of all, hopes of raising the quality and status of vocational learning – the biggest single weakness of English education – were dashed, as more practical subjects were shoehorned into a structure that put traditional academic learning at the apex.

Such flaws have become increasingly evident and Gove’s reforms were just an attempt to paper over the cracks. His successors should design a coherent curriculum for 14- to 19-year-olds, with academic, technical, creative and vocational programmes offered around a common core of maths, literacy and IT skills. These should be assessed within a single diploma framework with annual “intermediate” levels, based mostly if not entirely on internal school assessments, leading to a final graded leaving qualification secured mainly through a high-stakes, public examination at 18 or 19.

This was more or less what an official committee, under former Ofsted chief inspector Mike Tomlinson, proposed in 2004. The report was rejected by Tony Blair because, he said, the familiar and (he thought) trusted standards of A-levels and GCSEs should be preserved. Current shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt has promised to “revisit the arguments”. If Labour is elected, he should make that his most urgent priority.